Judge Sparkle Sooknanan

A federal judge in Florida has ruled that a Washington, D.C., judge, the Joe Biden-appointed Sparkle Sooknanan, deliberately violated a court-approved settlement when she arbitrarily ordered the suspension of an election-integrity system.

And now the issue is that two federal courts have issued opposing rulings, likely sending the fight to the appellate level.

A report at Just the News said it was a “big win” for President Donald Trump, as the Florida order tells the Department of Homeland Security to restore voter verification features of the SAVE system.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system is used by states to verify citizenship and immigration status, the report said.

Sooknanan had claimed across 75 pages of her opinions that the features violated the Social Security Act and Privacy Act. They didn’t, the federal court in Florida ordered.

The Trump administration had expanded the system to “better support state election integrity,” the report said.

It is U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II whose decision pointed out that Sooknanan’s ruling violated a court-approved settlement with Florida and other states. He had approved the settlement last year and maintained jurisdiction the dispute.

“Defendants are plainly in violation of the settlement agreement because it is undisputed that they disabled the bulk-upload and SSN-search features that the agreement expressly required the SAVE system to have,” Wetherell ordered. “The fact that defendants disabled those features to comply with [the judge’s] order does not change the fact that they violated the agreement.”

The defendants now have less than a week to file a status report with him on their progress.

Judge T. Kent Wetherell II held DHS breached a court-approved settlement by disabling the SAVE features after Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan’s ruling. He also expressly disagreed with her legal analysis, concluding the SSN-search and bulk-upload features do not violate federal law.

— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) July 7, 2026

A report from the Gateway Pundit explained, “The radical Left’s desperate scheme to flood American elections with illegal non-citizen votes just hit a massive, Trump-shaped brick wall in Florida.”

It described the problem as the “highly controversial order by a far-left, foreign-born activist judge in Washington D.C.,” explaining Wetherell has reinstated the security system.

Trump had said, “Free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic. The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election. Under the Constitution, State governments must safeguard American elections in compliance with Federal laws that protect Americans’ voting rights and guard against dilution by illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error. Yet the United States has not adequately enforced Federal election requirements that, for example, prohibit States from counting ballots received after Election Day or prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.”

The report called Sooknanan’s opinion a “crackpot ruling.”

“She whined that the federal government had ‘knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote’ and accused the administration of ‘haphazardly combined and repurposed’ data,” the report said.

It described how Sooknanan has “a long record of radical rulings,” such as blocking Trump’s deportation plans and shutting down an FTC investigation into far-left Media Matters.

Florida and multiple other states had reached a settlement with DHS last year requiring the SAVE system to remain functional.

Sooknanan’s demand that the program’s features be shut down prompted Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to go back to court to have the settlement enforced.

“Plaintiffs’ emergency motion to enforce settlement agreement is GRANTED, and Defendants shall immediately comply… by reinstating Plaintiffs’ access to the bulk-upload and SSN-search features in the SAVE system,” Wetherell said.

Bob Unruh

Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is currently a news editor for the WND News Center, and also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially. Read more of Bob Unruh's articles here.